Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

[stell]

Typically I use Https://conversationexchange.com

Same! It’s by far the best place I’ve found to connect with serious language learners. I think because it’s very bare-bones and non-social-media-esque, it tends to attract people who are looking for actual language partners.

[rdearman]

Italian
Completed a second series of an Italian TV show. No language exchanges

French
Nothing, some French YT channels.

Korean
No language exchanges and only a little TTMIK and Pimsluer

General Stuff
I was sick as a dog for over a week. To the point I couldn't get out of bed. I had fever and chills and shakes for a couple of days, then hacking coughs and vomiting. Couldn't eat and basically felt like death. Luckily, I had an interview the day before the illness set in, and I got the job, so I'll have a lot more time to listen to Korean on my long ass commute. I'm booking a trip to Japan at the end of the year, and really I should brush up on my Japanese. But I spent 2 years in Okinawa, and I figure my tourist Japanese is still sufficient.

[rdearman]

OK, so change of format for this update, since I figure it is just going to be a long stream of thought type of brain dump.

I've done a little bit of Italian, mainly helping someone out who has an exam due, so it was mostly in English except where I had to explain something in Italian. Not a lot of French since most of my partners seemed to have fallen off the edge of the world, but not really a problem since I'm reading a French popular science book at the moment, so that is keeping the vocabulary top of the mind. For Korean, I've now got a problem which I don't think I can solve easily. All bar one of my LE partners in Korean live in ... wait for it.... Korea! Now that I've started a new job, and hence the inevitable commute and long days, it is impossible to synch times when I'm not working, with times that they aren't working. So I would need to move the LE's to the weekend, but I never do that, since the weekend is spent with the wife and/or children and that is a rule I don't break. But even with the person who lives in the UK, this is a problem, since they are really only available when I'm at work.

So I don't know how that will pan out in the end, but I figure I'll probably not get much opportunity to speak to these people. On the other hand, since I'm earning money again (Yay!) I should also be able to take up some iTalki lessons, which mean I can schedule lessons prior to going to work, so this just involves me getting up early, a couple of hours before I need to leave for work.

I also feel I should brush up on my Japanese, which is basically non-existent, but probably more than the Korean I knew before disembarking the aeroplane in Seoul. (BTW, why do people say "De-planeing"when getting off an aeroplane when there is a perfectly acceptable word like 'disembarking'? If you are going to do that, why don't you de-boat, or de-car, or de-train?) Anyway...

The advantage is that I'll now have 3 hours per weekday locked up by myself in a car, so lots of time to listen to things. In the past I used to do travelling in = French and travelling home = Italian. But this time it will probably be Korean there and back again, with the occasional French or Italian podcast thrown in when I'm bored.

This also means I'll struggle with my reading goal. I'm already 22 books behind target as of today, so lot of catching up to do. However! There are a lot of books I want to read which are available as audiobooks, and the app I use to read books (FBReader Pro) will read e-books to me in just about any language I want. So all is not lost, since if I get bored with Pimsluer or Podcasts, I can just get the app to read me a story as I drive. Audiobooks count for me as "books read" toward my target of 150 books this year. So might be spending a lot of time with Librivox downloading the classics.

Strangely, I might get to the point where I would need more time to commute in order to do all the stuff I want to do!

My plan is to do all my language learning in the car, and save anything else for whenever I get a chance. Obviously, I'll have anki on my phone, so I can use any stolen moments to do that. I'm not sure about this job, but mostly I tend to sit at my desk working on a computer, so I normally have a chance to just listen to stuff as I work. Typically, this is music, but I might try to lever French or Italian podcasts into this instead.

So, most of my other projects are going to be parked and I'll just focus on a few things + work.

[jeffers]

(BTW, why do people say "De-planeing"when getting off an aeroplane when there is a perfectly acceptable word like 'disembarking'? If you are going to do that, why don't you de-boat, or de-car, or de-train?)

I've wondered this myself, and you got me to do a quick Google. Apparently the term goes back to the 1920s, so I guess it comes from the early years of passenger aviation. The problem with disembark is that it could also refer to a plane or ship leaving land. All this and more: https://grammarist.com/spelling/deplane-or-disembark/

Congratulations on the new job, and also on the enforced solitude, aka commute.

[rdearman]

I haven't been very good at updates lately. Started a new job and the commute and the work have left little time for other things. So thought I would give an update on what I have done as opposed to all the stuff I should but didn't.

I have been doing Pimsluer Korean in the car still. So just to recap, I've been listening to one epoxide of Pimsluer every day for a week before I move on to the next one. So this means I've got that episode down to the point I can answer before they do. This week I'm doing the very last episode of the Korean I and after Easter I'll start on the Korean II second set of disks.

Some of the people at this new job speak French, although I haven't spoken with any of them in French. But a couple of people in HR discovered I speak Italian, and they have personal connections with Italy and want me to help them, so I greet them in Italian and try to teach them a phrase or two each day. Of course, I've given them directions to the forum and the Master List of Resources, so hopefully they can progress on their own.

Yesterday, (Saturday) my wife and I took a trip around to New Malden in south London, which is Korea Town. I've read it is the largest diaspora or enclave of Korean people outside either North or South Korea. This is our second trip. It isn't that close to me, it takes about an hour and half to get there. One place we like to visit is the Korean Community Centre, because they are open to the public, and they have a small café where they sell traditional Korean foods. I enjoyed a delicious bowl of something I think was Dakgaejang (닭개장) but I didn't actually catch the name. A Korean lady in front of me ordered it, and it looked so good, both my wife and I just said, "same for us".

One of the things I like to do is to nip into charity shops and browse the books. I hit up all the charity shops on the high street in New Malden, looking specifically for second-hand Korean books. I figured if I was going to find a book in Korean in the UK, this was the place. I struck lucky in the 3rd or 4th charity shop and discovered five Korean manga books (they are actually Japanese in the Korean translation, but whatever) and I bought them and brought them home. I was a little annoyed since they were marked in pounds(£) but the books have the Korean price in won on the back too. So I paid slightly more for a used book than the person who bought them new in Korea.

It was slightly frustrating to be surrounded by Koreans, yet unable to speak. Not because I'm particularly shy, but because my wife wasn't going to hang around waiting for me to find a victim, and my Korean isn't really up to snuff.

In one of the charity shops (not the one with the Korean books) I struck a language learner's goldmine. They had an entire row of books for learning languages. Spanish, Italian, French, Greek, Chinese (Mandarin & Cantonese) plus some others. I didn't buy them out, but I did purchase a beginners Japanese book. I'm planning a trip to Japan, so I thought a refresher of "Tourist Japanese" would be a good idea. I managed to live for 2 years in Okinawa with about 10 phrases and hand gestures so I don't think I'll be switching from Korean yet. Although, my wife who has been watching lots of Japanese dramas recently was surprised when I told her that "Mushi Mushi" for hello only worked on the telephone.

I did consider doing Pimsluer Japanese on my return leg of the commute, but I'm not going to get sucked into another language! I was only going to learn Korean for one trip and quit. It is a slippery slope which I'm trying desperately to avoid. READ MY LIPS! No Japanese! You cannot make me learn Japanese! (Dear Universe, that is not a challenge)

[rdearman]

Easter weekend, so I have time for a little update. I spent last night and a bit of this morning converting the Talk To Me In Korean anki deck cards (Available on the Internet Archive) and changed them into mp3 files suitable for use with gradint. The idea here was that when I complete the Pimsleur Korean, I have a similar course to move on to in Korean. Pimsleur has 14 lessons in two courses, so 28 thirty-minute lessons. The TTMIK gradint version I've got 1500 thirty-minute lessons. (I stopped it running at 1500, could have had more)

I'm now thinking I will do Pimsluer to work and TTMIK from work. I spent a week trying to read the Korean comics I have, but it is too hard. So I think I need to go back to the LWT korean stuff. I've actually installed Lute via docker, so I've been using that. I've found some dictionaries for it I copied from LWT:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... n_US#gid=0
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... php?t=5648

Not doing much else. I talked to a Korean exchange partner in order to find the name of a Korean song for a French language exchange partner. lol.

[rdearman]

I've created some Gradint (Pimsluer like) lessons from the Korean conversations I've had where the tutor or the partner wrote down the words and phrases I didn't know into the chat window. I had turned these into anki cards, but I exported the anki decks to a csv then created some audio files with AWS Polly, then I put all those into Gradint and volia... instand Pimsluer on phrases I need to know, which I can listen to in the car on my long commute.

Here is the python code I used to turn the anki deck export into audio.

Code: Select all

import os
import sys
import logging
import traceback
import shutil
import os
import boto3

def clean_string(string, max_length=100):
    cleaned_string = string.replace(' ', '_')  # Replace spaces with underscores
    cleaned_string = ''.join(c for c in cleaned_string if c.isalnum() or c == '_' or c == '.')  # Allow dots in the string
    cleaned_string = cleaned_string[:max_length]  # Truncate the string if it exceeds max_length
    return cleaned_string.lower()  # Convert to lowercase


def generate_mp3(text, filename, voice_id='Emma', lang_code='en-GB'):
    polly_client = boto3.client('polly',
                                region_name='us-west-2',
                                aws_access_key_id='YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_HERE',
                                aws_secret_access_key='YOUR_SECRET_KEY_HERE')
    response = polly_client.synthesize_speech(Text=text, OutputFormat='mp3', VoiceId=voice_id, LanguageCode=lang_code)

    with open(filename, 'wb') as f:
        f.write(response['AudioStream'].read())
#        print(f'Audio content written to file "{filename}"')


# Function to format the counter with at least four digits
def format_counter(counter):
    return f"{counter:04d}"

# main function
def main():
    # Counter to keep track of file numbers
    counter = 1

    # Path to the CSV file
    csv_file_path = 'tmp.csv'  # Replace 'your_file_name.csv' with the actual file path

    # Directory paths
    media_dir_en = './media/EN/'
    media_dir_ko = './media/KO/'
    os.makedirs(media_dir_en, exist_ok=True)
    os.makedirs(media_dir_ko, exist_ok=True)

    # Read the CSV file
    with open(csv_file_path, 'r', encoding='utf-8') as file:
        for line in file:
            # Split the line into columns
            columns = line.strip().split('\t')
            if len(columns) >= 2:  # Ensure there are at least 2 columns
                print (format_counter(counter))
                try:
                    # Extract the words and mp3 name
                    word = clean_string(columns[0])
                    mp3_column = columns[-1].strip()
                   
                    # Extract the mp3 filename from the column
                    if mp3_column.startswith("[sound:") and mp3_column.endswith(".mp3]"):
                        mp3_name = mp3_column.split("[sound:")[-1].split("]")[0].strip()
                    else:
                        mp3_name = ""
                   
                    # Check if mp3_name is not empty
                    if mp3_name:
                        # Copy the mp3 file
                        mp3_file_path = f"/home/rick/.local/share/Anki2/User 1/collection.media/{mp3_name}"
                        ko_file_path = os.path.join(media_dir_ko, f"{format_counter(counter)}_{word}_ko.mp3")
                        shutil.copy(mp3_file_path, ko_file_path)
                    else:
                        # Extract the translation from the 2nd column
                        translation = columns[1].strip()

                        # Generate MP3 files for Korean translations
                        generate_mp3(columns[1], os.path.join(media_dir_ko, f"{format_counter(counter)}_{word}_ko.mp3"),voice_id='Seoyeon', lang_code='ko-KR')

                        # # Create Korean text file
                        # ko_file_path = os.path.join(media_dir_ko, f"{format_counter(counter)}_{word}_ko.txt")
                        # with open(ko_file_path, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as ko_file:
                        #     ko_file.write(translation)

                    # Generate MP3 files for English words
                    generate_mp3(columns[0], os.path.join(media_dir_en, f"{format_counter(counter)}_{word}_en.mp3"))

                    counter += 1
                except IndexError:
                    print(f"Error: Unable to process line {line.strip()}. It does not have enough columns.")
                    continue

    print("Files created successfully.")
    return 0

if __name__ == '__main__':
    try:
        exit_code = main()
    except Exception:
        traceback.print_exc()
        logging.error("Exception occurred", exc_info=True)
        exit_code = 1
    sys.exit(exit_code)

You'd need an assess key and secret key for Polly. You can use Google, but you'll quickly run out of free attempts, so I paid for it with AWS, I think generating a couple of thousand audio files cost me about $3.00.

If anyone wants detailed instructions, let me know, and I'll knock something up, and or do a YT video with instructions. It might take me awhile though, busy working.

[emk]

You'd need an assess key and secret key for Polly. You can use Google, but you'll quickly run out of free attempts, so I paid for it with AWS, I think generating a couple of thousand audio files cost me about $3.00.

By the way, I have been really impressed by OpenAI's text-to-speech—it works quite well for English and French, and it sounds much more natural and fluid than what I remember from 5-10 years ago. If you're going to do any more big exports, it might be worth comparing the voice quality.

[Lawyer&Mom]

New Malden has 10,000 Koreans, Koreatown in Los Angeles had 46,000 Koreans as of 2008. (There are 325,000+ Korean Americans in the greater LA area.)

[rdearman]

New Malden has 10,000 Koreans, Koreatown in Los Angeles had 46,000 Koreans as of 2008. (There are 325,000+ Korean Americans in the greater LA area.)

Meh... minus one point for which ever crappy search engine, wikipedia or other resource told me that.